Software architecture, software engineering, and Renaissance Jazz

I'm returning to my blog after an absence of three months. I've been attending to some personal matters which had left me dispirited, but I'm again ready to participate in the dance of life.

I've been traveling a great deal these past months, with almost two-thirds of my time spent on the road. One of the highlights of my wanderings was speaking at Fortune's BrainstormTech. In our panel on The Future of Code I observed that IBM was a company that had gone through a near-death experience yet had come through to the other side wiser and stronger, that Microsoft was a company undergoing a midlife crisis, and that Google was a company in serious need of adult supervision - at which point Vint Cerf piped up from the audience saying "why do you think they hired me?" Another highlight of these past months was my appointment to the board of trustees for the Computer History Museum.

I'm in the process of rebuilding the Handbook site. Basically, I have a scaling problem: I have far more content below the surface and much more to come than I am able to easily manage with my old infrastructure, so I'm rebuilding the site from the ground up. Sometimes, you've just gotta throw one away.

Quote of the day:

Grief: it is a time in our life when the familiar disappears, we are not who we are, and we are not who we are becoming.Melody Beattie